The Aperture Notebook is the central document in the Wardenclyffe Dossier. The deceased began it on the night of his brother Dane's death — the eleventh of August, 1861, in the parsonage at Smiljan, by candle he was not supposed to have — and he made his last entry in it on the afternoon of the seventh of January, 1943, in Room 3327 of the Hotel New Yorker, having that afternoon played for the first time in forty years the wax cylinder that confirmed for him what the apparatus at Wardenclyffe had been. He was eighty-six. He died four hours later, with the notebook closed between his hands.
The notebook is a brown leather octavo, 188 pages, ruled. It contains entries in five distinct hands of the same writer — a five-year-old's, a fifteen-year-old fevered with cholera, a man of forty in command of his powers, a man of forty-seven on the night of the firing, and a man of eighty-six on the afternoon of his death. The reader is asked to remember that they are the same writer.
Five pages have been selected for this exhibit, one from each of the five hands. The five represent, in the editorial judgment of this office, the five pivotal entries of the notebook. The remaining 183 pages — including the working sketches, the calculations, the marginal love-notes from Mrs. Katharine Johnson, the seventeen names sealed in the envelope by Mr. Scherff and folded into the back, and the pencilled record of every pigeon the deceased fed in forty years on West Thirty-Fourth Street — are catalogued separately as Artifacts 003 through 014.
Read each page in order. The notebook was meant to be read in order.
Three days. The doctor says I shall not last the week. My mother in the chair beside the bed is sleeping with her hand on my hand. I write because if I do not write I shall, in the morning, not remember what came up the wall in the night.
It came up the wall and it stood at the foot of the bed and it was — I shall not write what it was. I shall write what I asked it.
I asked it: Are you the door?
It did not speak. It bent its head. The bending of the head was the answer. The bending was a yes.
I asked it: Was it you that took Dane?
The bending again. Yes. But not the same yes. The second yes was the yes a man gives when he is asked whether he was, technically, the instrument of a thing he did not, in his own mind, choose.
I asked it: If I live, may I learn to open you?
The thing at the foot of the bed did not bend. The thing at the foot of the bed turned and walked, very slowly, the way it had come — down the wall, in reverse, head first, into the corner where the wall meets the floor — and it did not, on the way down, look at me.
I shall take that as a yes also. I shall take all silences from the thing as a yes.
I am, this morning, by my mother's accounting, going to live. The doctor came at six. He has, he says, never seen a fever break so cleanly in a boy of my colour.
I shall, when I am well, learn what an electrical apparatus is. I shall, in the years that come, learn how to build one. And I shall, with what I learn, build a door I can open from this side.
— N., 11 April 1873.
I have, this night, transmitted three pulses on the eight-hertz carrier and have received, in reply, five. The receiver log records the event in the small dispassionate language of a scientific notebook (see Book II, pp. 47–53). I write here, in this notebook, because what I shall write here is not for any scientific notebook and not for any colleague. — it is for me, and for whoever may, after I am gone, be permitted to read this book. —
The signals are not from Mars.
The signals are from the place Dane went.
I have suspected this since the second night. I have known it since the third. I have, on the fourth night, transmitted my reply, and the reply that has come back is a count that has advanced by two in the time I took to send three. The thing that advanced the count is a thing that, having received a transmission, is moving toward the transmitter. The thing has reached five. I do not know what the count from one means. I know what the count from five would mean.
It would mean: they are coming up. one at a time. they have reached the fifth one.
I shall, in the morning, instruct Lowenstein to draft a piece for the North American attributing the signals to Mars. I shall not, ever, in any year of the rest of my life, write the word Mars in this notebook in connection with this event. The word would be a lie. I have learned, at forty-three, that there are lies one tells the public to keep them safe and lies one tells oneself to keep oneself useful, and that the latter, in a man whose work depends on truth at the bench, are the more corrosive of the two.
I shall not, in this notebook, lie.
I shall write, then, the truth I have understood tonight, which is this:
The door I have looked for since the eleventh of August 1861 is a door I shall, with the apparatus I shall now build on Long Island, learn how to open. I have spent thirty-eight years learning what the door is. I shall now spend the rest of my life learning what is on the other side of it. I shall, if I am very careful, learn that without bringing through anything that should not be brought through.
I shall not be very careful.
I shall, by my own arrangement, in the years to come, send eighteen men down. I do not, on the present page, on the present night, know that I shall send eighteen men down. I shall, when I do it, write of each one in this book, by name, on a single line, with the date and the manner of his descent. The pages reserved for the eighteen are pages 121 through 138 of this notebook. — God forgive me, I am leaving the pages blank, ready, on this fourth of November 1899, four years before the first man goes down. —
— N. T., Knob Hill, 4 Nov. 1899, 4.40 AM.
The primary fired at twelve per cent of yield at eleven minutes past eleven. The eight-hertz carrier was clean. The aperture opened, by Czito's measurement, for one minute and four seconds.
On the count, the following:
Eighteen. Eighteen souls, on the count, into the door.
Czito has timed the closing of the aperture. The aperture, by his accounting, did not close on time. The aperture, after the eighteenth man, paused for a further three seconds, and on the nineteenth count — by which I had not, in my arrangement, intended to send anything — a small grey pigeon flew, from the dark above the field, in through the door from the other side.
She landed on the cottage roof at twelve-eight in the morning.
I have brought her in. I have given her water. I have set her on the sill. She has not, in the four hours I have watched her, moved. She has, in those four hours, looked at me with brown-amber eyes that are not, I think, in any biological sense, the eyes of a pigeon.
I have named her Dagmar. I do not know why I have named her Dagmar. There was a small grey pigeon I loved on Fourth Street in 1885. The pigeon's name was Dagmar. She died in the snow of the winter of '86. I have not, since then, named any pigeon Dagmar. I have not, since then, allowed myself to grow fond of any single pigeon. I have, this morning, named her Dagmar.
Czito has come up to the cottage. Czito has looked at the bird on the sill. Czito has not asked me what the bird is. Czito has said, very quietly: "Mr. Tesla. Whatever the door has sent back, you shall not, in any year of the rest of your life, send another man through that aperture."
I shall not.
I have, this morning, telegraphed Mr. Westinghouse to dismantle the primary's coupling to the high-tension feed. I have, this morning, instructed Czito to fill the underground primary chamber with seawater from the Sound by sundown tomorrow. I have, this morning, written to no person except Mr. Scherff, asking him to compose a letter to the families of the eighteen, by the arrangement we long ago agreed upon, with the wages owed and no return direction.
The door is closed. The door shall remain closed.
The bird is on the sill.
She has, in the past hour, eaten a single grain of millet from my hand.
— N. T., Wardenclyffe, 13 Nov. 1903, 4.20 AM.
I am eighty-six. I shall not see eighty-seven. I have not, in the past three weeks, been hungry. I have not, in the past five days, been able to keep down water. The hotel doctor — a Dr. Wagner, of Eighty-Sixth Street — saw me on Tuesday and said, with the careful kindness of a doctor who has, in the previous winter, lost six patients to similar declines, that he would not, on the present evidence, prescribe any medicine other than rest. Dr. Wagner is an honest man.
I have set the door down today.
I have set it down because I have, this afternoon, played the cylinder. Czito's transcript was accurate. There were nineteen tones. They were at equal intervals. They were a count of nineteen.
The count, in the listening band, was — I have, in the forty years since Czito and I last spoke of it on the third of December, 1903, in a small Hungarian café in Brooklyn — a count of arrivals. We had agreed that the nineteenth, on the night of the firing, had been the night-watchman O'Connell, the four men in the wagon, the thirteen from below, and the small grey pigeon Dagmar, who had returned not as the price for any of the men but as something else.
I have, this afternoon, listening on the cylinder, understood what the something else was.
The nineteenth tone, on the cylinder, is not equal in pitch to the eighteen that precede it. It is, by perhaps a sixteenth of a tone, lower. I had not, on the morning of the thirteenth of November, 1903, listened to the recording. Czito had, in his transcript, treated the nineteen tones as equivalent. They are not equivalent.
The nineteenth tone is in a different voice.
The voice is the voice of a thing on the other side that, having received eighteen arrivals from my apparatus on the night of the firing, sent — on the nineteenth count — a return.
The return came back through the closing aperture in the form of one small grey pigeon, who arrived on the cottage roof at approximately twelve-eight in the morning and has stayed with me for forty years.
She is not Dagmar. She is not, perhaps, even a pigeon. She is the answer the door sent back, in the only form it could send: in the form, identical to the form that had been on the windowsill in '85, that I had taught it, by my own grief, to send.
She is, I add, on the writing desk now. She has been on the writing desk since I sat down to write this entry. She is — small, grey, with one wing held slightly oddly — a good and quiet companion, and she is not, in any biological sense, twenty years old, although by the measure of the world the small grey pigeon I named Dagmar in 1903 should, by 1922, have died. There has been, since 1903, exactly one pigeon in my life. She has been the same pigeon. She has not, in any decade I can pin down, been a pigeon who aged.
She has been, in the forty years since 1903, the price of every life I sent. One small grey pigeon, repeated with patience, sufficient for nineteen.
I have, this afternoon, set down the door.
I shall, this evening, sleep with her on the perch beside the bed, and I shall, sometime in the night, stop breathing, and the pigeon shall — if I have understood the long contract correctly — at the moment of my last breath also stop, and she and I shall, together, be the twentieth and twenty-first arrivals on the other side, the count advancing by two, on the same night, after a forty-year pause.
My father wrote what he had to write. He was a good man. He did not know.
The first motor was a motor I made for Dane. The last motor I have built is the tower at Wardenclyffe. I have, between, built nothing of consequence. Both motors were built for the same person.
Page 1 — the three words of the eleventh of August, 1861 — is the private record of the same event recorded officially by Father Milutin in the parish book the following morning. For the official version, see Artifact 015. For the June-Bug Motor pasted into the back cover of this notebook in 1916, see Artifact 010.
Page 102 — the Knob Hill entry of 4 November 1899 — corresponds to the pivotal sentence on page 51 of the receiver log, reproduced as Artifact 086. See also Artifact 084 (earlier nights) and Artifact 085 (audio reconstruction).
Page 138 — the night of the firing — is corroborated by the secondary ledger of the business manager, Mr. Scherff, reproduced as Artifact 047. The seventeen names sealed by Mr. Scherff in an envelope and folded into the back of this notebook are the seventeen names of the Scherff ledger; the eighteenth (the night-watchman O'Connell, who was not on any ledger) is named only here.
The four sealed envelopes the deceased prepared on the afternoon of this final entry, addressed to Mrs. Marguerite Kelley Pomeroy, to Julius Czito, to Sava Kosanović, and to the empty grave of Mrs. Robert Underwood Johnson at Sleepy Hollow, are item 06 of the federal seizure inventory, Artifact 091.
The wax cylinder referred to in this final entry — the recording made by Mr. Czito on the night of 12 November 1903 — is item 02 of the same seizure inventory and is catalogued in the Audio section as Artifact 087 (the unprocessed cylinder) and Artifact 088 (the 2016 digital reconstruction at the original tone-spacing, in which the sixteenth-tone discrepancy of the nineteenth count is, for the first time since 7 January 1943, audible).
For the personal letter from J. Pierpont Morgan that the deceased placed in the back of this notebook on 6 July 1903 and never opened again, see Artifact 061.